Transplanetary Americas: Art, Outer Space, and the Latinx Imagination

"In Transplanetary, Robb Hernández seeks to reset the terms Latinx expressivity beyond the ground and instead point the field toward transplanetary relations. The book explores how Latinx artists respond to space science and the modern space race, artists for whom aerospace technology, ancient cosmology, astronomic data visualization, or modern space history is central to their practice. But it goes beyond this looking-skyward to think Latinx art history differently and offers a way to study the ascendant attentions of artists of Latin American descent that expand the terms of Latinx belonging. Through this lens, Hernández shows how "science fiction art" mediated lowbrow channels in the first half of the twentieth century, the ways in which the Apollo program galvanized artistic responses that contradicted or fit uncomfortably around the political tumult of the civil rights era in the NASA Space Art program, and how identitarian discourses of nation and period in US and Latin American art historical canons struggled to assimilate the propulsive pathways produced by these artists who frustrate categories of time and place"-- Provided by publisher.